I sometimes find it surprising when I find myself understating the significance of bullying in schools. It's not that I don't care, but for some reason, I don't seem to show much interest in it. Yet the irony is, my story begins here.
I was never bullied - so far as I can remember - before grade 7, age 12. During this period in my life, my mom was beginning to go through a 3 year long major depression. I didn't know it at the time, but the depression, strife and emotional havoc in my home life exerted an unconscious power while I was at school. For some reason, I began feeling more depressed, which in my case, manifested as a shyness, insecurity and overall resistance towards socializing. I didn't understand why I understood this way, it was odd. The year before, I spent my summer playing sports with the guys I hung out with at school; tennis at the courts, or soccer, or basketball. I was short, probably the shortest person in my grade, but I made do with it. I got along with my oftentimes self deprecating humour. In short, I was short, and instead of concentrating on that, I pretended that I didn't care. It worked when I was more or less happy, and my home life was functional.
The next year, grade 8, was completely different. While I experienced more bullying towards the end of grade 7, and especially in the summer before grade 8, it hadn't metastasized into anything significant. I just more or less processed the jabs about my height or my hair (I had a "fro", although I wasn't black, I was the closest thing at the time in the very white school I attended) in a different way. This was obviously connected to the disarray at home. In Grade 8, a new kid entered our school. I was in a split grade 7-8 class, I was in the 8th grade, while the new kid, Adam Mcdennis, was in this 7th grade. Despite this fact, Adam entered school with a certain reputation of unruliness and unconformity. At age 12, he was around 5'10, lanky, wore a looped nose ring, bleached blonde hair, and the whole skater look. I sensed in Adam an aura of indifference about whether people liked him, about school, about rules. I found this quality intimidating. He was taller than me by over a foot, and when he spoke, he had such a nonchalance about manner or decency, that I had every reason to feel a little trepidation about socializing with him.
Why was Adam interested in me? I don't know, but I like to speculate as to why. First, I do know that Adam didn't have a stable home life; I knew he had moved from Vancouver where his dad lived to come to the GTA. My first impression on him probably influenced his subsequent designs against me. I was shy - always was. But that year I simply felt less oomph. It had started in the summer prior - at the same time that my mom was exhibiting mental instability at home. Adam probably saw in me something he seemed to particularly hate: weakness. I was feeling week, overwhelmed by the emotions of a tattered home life, the stress of school and socializing, and Adam, in his predatorial way, took advantage.
The school year began in September. I didn't have the endurance to finish in June. I left school in late April or early May because of the stress, anxiety and trauma caused from the bullying. I went to school depressed, experienced the heat, shame and anxiety for hours on end until the bell rang, and went home ashamed of my weakness and my fallen social status. At this same time, I had been badly bullying my younger brother, and was abusing my dog. It was all occurring unconsciously. I was hiding it all from others - I managed to convince my mom, despite my complaints about bullying, that it was really my "muscles" that were hurting. The illusion wore on long enough for my mom to claim to my teacher and principle that I had some undisclosed neurological disorder. I was later told by classmates that rumour had it that I had multiple sclerosis.
The bullying was horrendous. Till this day, its still somewhat muffled, as I did a very thorough job trying to suppress the memory of it. But plenty of details persist. I remember having to do group projects - and the anxiety I would experience figuring out who I would work with. Alas, I would be paired up with someone who also had social difficulties (and who also may have been autistic). This was completely unlike my earlier experiences at school. Again, I was shy, but I hadn't been disabled by anxiety from acting despite my fear. But now, the sheer presence of Adam Mcdennis imposed a burden on me. The bullying began with him; in others, it was more or less 'teasing' rather than malicious bullying. In him, the teasing of the earlier year had transitioned into emotional abuse. And with his lead, others began to follow, although to a lesser extent.
Especially humiliating was the effect it had on my friend Ross. In grade 7, I had built a pretty close friendship with a guy named Ross. Ross was the typical mischief maker, but at the same time, he seemed to have a goodness about him - an honesty, or simplicity, that made being with him easy. But in grade 8, all of a sudden things changed. In the new social context, Mike wasn't as popular as he had been before; his social status had more or less deteriorated into nothingness. It would be a social faux pas to hang around with him. Understandable, I suppose. However, Ross didn't play a passive role, but rather, became an active player. Easily girded on by others, Ross contributed to the pain of the bullying. Of course, the chief architect of it all was the sociopathic Adam Mcdennis. Not only was he malicious, lacking even the semblance of empathy, but he was also popular, allowing him to recruit others into bullying me.
The net affect of grade 8 and age 13 on my life is impossible to understate. For the last 12 years, since age 16, I have been dealing with PTSD, OCD, all revolving around social anxiety. What happened between age 13 and age 16? I had managed to rehabilitate myself the next year in high school. I had "made" a new Mike. But alas, as fortune would have it, Adam Mcdennis entered the same high school that I attended the following year. In the summer before grade 10, Adam had coincidentally entered the same social network that I was apart of. And to make things weirder, my best friend in grade 9, John, his brothers best friend was Adams older brother, Sean. The connections couldn't have been worse for me. Throughout that summer, my name and my reputation fell in peoples eyes, no doubt due to the slanderous words of Adam Mcdennis. By the end of grade 9, my PTSD had returned, the anxiety I first experienced in grade 8 forced me to leave school in the first semester, forcing me to finish the semester in a special program at the board of education across the street. That summer, age 15, I began showing a fanatic interest in basketball, and midway through summer my moms cousin graciously recommended a youth basketball camp that was associated with the Toronto Raptors basketball team. I decided to go. Unbeknownst to me at the time, pretty much the entire group of people I was encountering were black. After a summer of playing basketball with the coolest people I could think of, I decided to enrol back at my old school, once again, reinvented, this time with a fake Carribbean accent, as spoken by Toronto's black youth. This time was the last time. The pressures were too great, my memory to resilient. I had never properly recovered or addressed the bullying that started it all. By the end of grade 11, I had a complete mental breakdown. I never spoke to anyone at school; I hardly spoke to anyone at home. And when I did speak, to my frustration, all I heard was anxiety, tension, unconfidence. It was as if the trauma had become "locked in", burned into my neural pathways. At that time, I didn't know what was wrong with me, but again, I had too much pride to acknowledge that there was anything wrong.
Fast forward 12 years.
I am a 27 year old man. Since age 20 I have been educating myself daily, searching for ways to help myself. I have grown and matured a great deal in that time period. I am but a faint echo of the Michael that I once was. I know myself inside and out. I am philosophical, scientific, and religious. The point of this blog is to combine two very important subjects: the real life effects of bullying on human beings after they leave school, and the amazing power of the human mind to affect change in the human brain.
As of this moment, I am still in the grips of my obsession. To explain my pathology quickly: I have PTSD brought on by bullying. My PTSD eventually evolved into an OCD - an obsessive monitoring of my voice as a I speak. Because I had begun imitating the black Carribean accented youth I admired at the basketball camp, I had made myself particularly cued to the externalities of speech. Because it was coming from without - that I was manufacturing the sound, based not on real feeling, but on a conscious belief that I was superior because of my connection to 'cool' black people, eventually, over time, this attitude combined with the resurgent trauma creating an obsession pathologically akin to body dysmorphia: instead of finding faults with my body, I found them in my voice. Because I didn't realize that the trauma was the source of the anxiety I was hearing in my voice, I began to "try" harder to make it sound normal. The harder I thought about it, the more entangled in it I became. The sheer fact of my inability to properly communicate with others made the prospect of socializing beyond my immediate family mortifying. As such, I have mostly broken most of my connections with cousins.
Nevertheless, I believe in the power of the human mind to engraft physical change on the human brain. Many PET scans show this; plenty of people, from sufferers of OCD, PTSD, Depression, Tourettes, and other commorbidities, have shown an ability to affect change through sheer will power.
Please join me in my journey. I am 12 years into this. I desperately want to get out of it. I believe I have the power to do it, as I believe all people have the power to shape the kind of minds they want to have, and the types of lives they want to live.
No comments:
Post a Comment